It’s also bigger, which means more value for money.

Digital Foundry Declares Xbox One the Unanimous Winner of Next-Gen Technological Showdown

There have been many spurious rumours floating around regarding the supposed superiority of PS4 ports of certain next generation multiplatform ports, yet until now gamers have been unable to compare the games directly, and it seems that the Sony defense force might be in for a bit of a rude awakening. Richard Leadbetter, the technical mastermind behind Eurogamer’s Digital Foundry, has spent some time with both next-gen consoles, and has come to the simple conclusion that the Xbox One is hands-down the more capable console.

Much has been made of the PS4′s resolution, yet extensive analysis has revealed that the Xbox One is able to trump this easily through the use of Microsoft’s patented super pixel technology. Super pixels are essentially the same thing as regular pixels, yet have the potential to be rendered up to two times larger. What this means for Xbox One games is that the same scene can be rendered using fewer pixels, meaning that the Xbox One can dedicate additional graphical resources to improving core graphical effects which the PS4 must instead expend on rendering out pixels.

The Xbox One’s advantages do not end there, as the console features many fixed function proprietary components designed to enhance gameplay, the most notable of which is the console’s use of high-latency dedicated lag buffers. Many credible sources have noted that when frames are displayed after being rendered the alacrity of their appearance can serve to make a game’s control input noticeably twitchy. The Xbox One’s lag buffers are able to mitigate this phenomenon by synching rendered frames and the game’s control input scheme to a later timing, making for digital experiences which are much more consistent.

Finally, the Xbox One is set to be the exclusive home of a number of next-generation rendering techniques only supported by Microsoft’s newest Direct X 11.69 revision. These techniques include: cartographical mapping, parasol shading techniques, and the newest advent in particle effect technology, granular particles [the Xbox One is practically packed full of the things]. All these qualities combine to make Xbox One the true home of next generation gaming, while the PS4 struggles to keep up.

Achievement unlocked 1000G: You are an American.

Microsoft Execs Promote the Powerful Xbox One

When you have a machine that is as undeniably powerful as the Xbox One, it should practically sell itself. Nonetheless, this week Microsoft executives have been talking up the absolute sense that a day-1 Xbox One purchase makes for every consumer. Microsoft’s Phill Spencer believes that the current nonsense over game resolutions will blow over once consumers buy an Xbox One on launch day, and are able to experience those super pixels for themselves. Games after all are about fun, not arbitrary numbers like 720p. The Xbox One is all about the games, and more powerful platforms such as the PC cannot hope to match its impressive line-up of exclusive software, like Titanfall. Moreover, the platforms competing with the Xbox One certainly are not the best all-in-one machines, so consumers looking at the PC or PS4 to serve as all-in-one devices will be sorely disappointed. Devices which utilise outdated some-in-one technology are unable to play TV, which makes their status as gaming consoles appear somewhat untenable. Only Microsoft and Xbox One will allow gamers to collect achievements and generate gamerscore by watching TV!

“Go play the games and tell us what you think about what they look. Right now, gamers don’t have the games to go play. They can’t walk into their local store and play the games. So, it doesn’t really surprise me that they’re going to focus on the specs that they can. I don’t criticize anyone for doing that. In the end, we play the games, not the resolution. I think it’ll blow over as people get to play the games.

If people want to get hung up on the numbers, they can do that, but really what they should be looking at is what’s on screen, with the controller in their hands, and play[ing] the game. If they really care they can go play Forza at 1080p / 60 fps; a beautiful game. But games should be defined by more than their framerate and resolution. I think this is an industry about fun and people should put the controller in their hand – or gesture – and play the games and decide what they like. I think that’s the soul of what this industry’s about.”

Microsoft Canada’s director of marketing, Craig Flannagan, is of the opinion that the Xbox One is so powerful that the next console generation will span more than a decade! To him the Xbox One is by far the superior proposition on account of its superior raft of services, such as TV. It is for this reason that the Xbox One will constitute the the best Christmas gift for gamers this, or indeed any other, holiday season.

“Xbox One is going to start ahead, in terms of the experience we can deliver,” Flannagan said. “And because we’re built for the future, we’re going to stay ahead. I think there is not a better experience you can buy this holiday, and there will not be a time this generation where there’s a better experience you can buy than Xbox One…And it’s probably going to be a pretty long generation. We’re probably here for a while because we’re built for the future. This is a console that will last you, conservatively a decade, if I had to put a bet down today.”

If this does not constitute proof that the Xbox One will dominate the video game industry for the next decade, then one does not know what would. The Xbox One UI features 100% more television integration than either of its competitors, so by that metric we can determine that it is the clearly superior gaming console. At this point the console’s only detractors appear to be Japanese racists who hate our freedom.

Xbox One is much more streamlined, meaning that it goes faster!

Developers Speak Out in Favour of the Xbox One’s Power

Developers love the Xbox One! The console gives them the power to make the best looking games of the next generation, with technologies such as super pixels and granular particle effects set to positively differentiate it from the less advanced competition. The development community loves the Xbox One so much that a broad selection of the development community this week spontaneously decided to reach out to game journalists in order to speak out in favour of Xbox One development.

For Dan Greenawalt, the creative director of Turn 10 who has been involved in the development of Forza 5, support for a 1080p resolution is something developers have to plan from the beginning, which is why PC gamers are unable to force 1080p for the handful of titles which do not support it, such as Dark Souls.

“You don’t happen your way into 1080p, it doesn’t matter how much power you have. You plan it from the beginning. And 60fps is even harder – it has to be in the culture of your team that every little aspect of content, the code, everything has to be developed that way. You start off with that plan and you build that plan.

For Danny Isaac, an executive producer for Rare who is currently working on Kinect Sports Rivals, the next console generation is more about innovation than it is about power. Isaac recounts the way that his game accidentally ended up with a 1080p resolution, and makes the extremely important point that the human eye can only notice changes in resolution up to 900p, and no more [making emerging technologies like 4k more than a little superfluous]. He also notes that with Kinect the Xbox one has the greatest controller that the world has ever seen, a development that Sony’s PS4 is ill-placed to match.

“We actually started at 720p and we didn’t think we had a problem there. The world still looked lush. The water looked fantastic. We went up to 960 and it got a bit crisper, and I remember looking at it going, ‘actually, yeah, that’s a big improvement.

One is really an amalgamation of a number of things. You have great graphical fidelity and power, but then we’ve got the sensor. We have a great controller.”

Crytek design director, P J Esteves, highlights the absurdity of gamers who fixate of arbitrary details like 720p, by noting that games already looked just fine on last generation’s consoles, so there is no real need to do anything differently. He also points out the absolute fact that there is absolutely no perceptible difference in image quality between native 1080p and a 900p image that has been stretched to fit a 1080p resolution [the trick must be in the Xbox One's superior use of nautical scaling].

“People just get really caught up because that’s what some people want to talk about, because I don’t think they have enough games to really sink their teeth into to figure out what that really means. But Crysis 2 was running at 720 and that game was beautiful on Xbox 360 for that time. Crysis 3 as well. Go figure.

The difference between 900 and 1080 it’s like… when some of the best rendering programmers in the world, when we sit down and look at the difference and they’re like, no, 900 is fine, the difference is infinitesimal that you’re not going to really recognise it.”

One is most pleased that the foremost technical minds of the development community decided to come out and dispel some of the myths surrounding this so-called 1080p business. This will no doubt allow most anyone who was on the fence about whether or not to buy an Xbox One to make their purchase with full confidence that the Xbox one is the most powerful console available for five hundred dollars.

A more useful application than gaming.

Microsoft Appeals to Business: Use Xbone for Conference Calls

As the weeks pass Microsoft grows increasingly desperate, as they flip and flop to and fro, never capable of staying on message longer than perhaps a week or so. Microsoft flubbed E3 with their DRM-leaden Xbone policies, before jettisoning them a mere week later, along with Xbone boss, Don Mattrick. The Xbone was originally targeted towards American TV and Football enthusiasts, before being pitched to a tiny subset of digital-only bro gaming elitists at E3, and now the console is being shopped to business in order to facilitate conference calls.

Microsoft spokesman, Marques Lyons, has this week made the desperate appeal to business that if they purchase an Xbone unit, then they will be able to write it off as a business expense by using it for conference calls:

“What is being positioned as an excellent entertainment device can be just as enticing for you and your small business. In fact, it’s entirely justifiable to make the Xbox One a business expense. The Xbox One, priced at $499, is an affordable option for small business owners, as there are many features built into the console that could help it rival even the most modest of video conferencing and networking platforms.

The app story of Xbox One has yet to be written, therefore it is entirely possible to find apps down the road that could be of benefit for you and your business, with the processing power, snap mode, and connection to a large screen, that the Xbox One has, this device is capable of going from the ‘break room’ to the ‘board room’.”

OK, so the Xbone is hardware capable of rivalling some of the basic communication functions of the most modest of networking platforms [smartphones, tablets, netbooks] – but that still does not explain why a business owner might opt for an Xbone instead of a nice, new Mac or PC as a tax deductible expense [both of which do not require a Gold subscription to serve their function]. Further, the Xbone’s hardware might be ideal for taking conference calls, but the quality of its nascent multimedia applications are very much an unknown quantity at this point.

Xbone’s multimedia functionality is likely to be poor in the console’s first year; subsequently multimedia support will vanish once Microsoft moves on to their next console, and good luck using Xbone to exchange document files during a conference call, as it is a closed platform with no flexibility built into the interface. Yes, the Xbone is probably capable of serving as a multimedia and conferencing device, but only as a half measure. Then again, practically every stated utility of the Xbone serves as a marginal half measure. This is the Xbone being targeted at smalltime self-employed persons who are too cheap to pay for a console, as opposed to it serving any serious business application – jack of all trades, master of Xbox-none.

More to the point though, what sort of company would allow Microsoft and their NSA buddies to have a direct and ‘always-on’ line into their corporate offices?

Nintendo probably did not want to have their precious IP associated with women’s breasts…

Nintendo Forbids Live Streaming of Super Smash Bros. Melee

Nintendo really does not want the Wii U to sell. The holiday season of 2013 is the appointed time at which the Wii U may begin to sell, and not a moment sooner. To this end Nintendo have been busily buying back surplus Wii U stock, along with imposing heavy restrictions on people doing Nintendo-based ‘let’s plays’ on Youtube, and now, just this week, Nintendo attempted to prevent EVO [Evolution Championship Series] from streaming their Super Smash Bros. Melee matches.

EVO is the largest fighting game tourney in the world, with EVO 2011 being streamed to over 2.2 million viewers around the globe – so having a game selected as one of the eight main attractions is kind of a big deal for developers. The eighth slot in EVO 2013′s event roster was left open to a popular vote [by way of fan donations to the Breast Cancer Research Foundation]. 225,744 dollars were raised all-up, of which 94,683 dollars were raised by Super Smash Bros. Melee, marking it as the clear winner.

All that looked to have come to naught however, as Nintendo sought to remove Super Smash Bros. Melee from the event altogether, before being talked around by EVO co-founder, Joey “Mr Wizard” Cuellar, to allow the game at the event in exchange for the removal of any event feed featuring Nintendo’s comic brawler:

“They were not only trying to shut down the stream, they were trying to shut down the event; the Smash portion of the event. It’s their IP, they can do whatever they want, and they didn’t present us with any options to keep it open, they were just ‘Hey, we want to shut you down’.

And we kinda wigwammed our way through it and they were fine with just shutting down the streaming portion of the event. And that was that. And we were not going to press any further.”

Happily, Nintendo were finally made to reverse their opposition to streaming Smash Bros. matches after strong online criticism led them to discover that Super Smash Bros. Melee was actually a GameCube title, and thus did not risk selling a great many units of Wii U hardware before holiday 2013.

Not fine.

Tim Schafer Labels Disillusioned Backer a ‘Troll’

This week in gaming, long-suffering indy-development martyr, Tim Schafer, was cruelly beset by “rants about ill uses of money and time from some sort of supposed moral high ground“, where “ranting” in this instance is apparently the bizarro-world definition for being beat about the head by truth, integrity, and inherent human decency.

Last week Schafer famously came clean about his poor planning being to blame for Double Fine’s Broken Game project blowing through its record-making 3.5 million dollar budget within the early stages of development, while making it smugly clear that he did not hold himself at all responsible, because this is just how the business of game design is done in large and entitled corporate development firms. This led to Broken Game backer, Aleczandia Banks [AKA Alexander Tyson], contacting Schafer on Twitter in order to be refunded for the one dollar pledge previously made to Schafer & co., on account of their constant mishandling of funds. This conversation probably should have ended with Schafer directing Banks to the relevant avenue for reimbursement, yet Schafer could not resist following-up with a parting shot, contending that Broken Game‘s botched execution is over-delivering on value for the project’s backers.

Schafer’s retort invited Banks to explain his position; that, yes, he was aware that his seeking reimbursement for a dollar only served as little more than a symbolic stand, and that he was making this stand because Schafer’s irresponsible abuse of crowd-sourcing for “FREE MONEY” has begun to ruin Kickstarter for legitimate independent developers. It would seem that all of this proved to be a little too much truth for Schafer to handle though, as he attempted to disingenuously pidgin-hole Banks in order to put him back into his box – first accusing him of jumping on a bandwagon, and then accusing Banks of being a non-backing troll, before being disproved by his shitty company’s own record keeping, and having to relent to affording him the status of being a ‘backing troll’ [?]. That is to say that in an effort to masterfully troll Double Fine, Aleczandia trollishly donated money to their doomed project, waited for a full sixteen months to pass, and then trollishly demanded a refund only after Schafer was forced to admit that his gross incompetence had lead to the team squandering the bulk of the funding within the early stages of development. Schafer then finished up in classic form by belittling the contributions made by backers of Double Fine’s lowest funding tier, by joking about spending Aleczandia’s dollar on one third of a packet of sparklers for the American Mutiny Day celebrations. Randy Pitchford has really found himself a soul mate in Schafer.

[Aleczandia Banks]: “At this point, I’m beyond caring – I’m actually saddened in a way.

…around it. And you really need to take some responsibility for that.”

[Tim Schafer]: “Well, I’m sad that logic doesn’t work on you. If we find out you’re a backer, we’ll happily refund your money.

Ohhhh. okay. Well, we’ll get that $1 back to you right away! Sorry you feel getting 10 episodes for $1 was a rip off!”

Schafer’s cloistered sense of entitlement is truly staggering, as this week’s escapades have even managed to outdo last week’s deplorable efforts. Aleczandia finishes up by quoting the words of Bobby Nodick [of all people], which funnily enough grow truer with the passing of the years:

“I’ve never met him in my life – I’ve never had anything to do with him. I never had any involvemnet in the Vivendi project that they were doing, Brutal Legend, other than I was in one meeting where the guys looked at it and said, ‘He’s late, he’s missed every milestone, he’s overspent the budget and it doesn’t seem like a good game. We’re going to cancel it.’

And do you know what? That seemed like a sensible thing to do. And it turns out, he was late, he missed every milestone,the game was not a particularly good game….”

Well might the same thing eventually come to be said about Broken Game.

The OST is as magical as the artwork.

Nintendo Direct Does the Business

For owners of Nintendo consoles Nintendo’s Nintendo Direct presentations are quickly becoming the only game in town. Previous Nintendo Direct presentations have seen the announcement of Monolith’s tentatively named X, along with the Wind Waker remake for the Wii U – and this week’s Nintendo Direct was no different. Chief among the week’s 3DS-centric announcements is the fact that Square Enix’s Bravely Default [tentative title] has now been confirmed for a Western localisation, with Nintendo as the publisher. The title has been given a vague 2014 release date for America, yet we may intuit that it will likely be released in early January on account of the fact that Nintendo of Europe have confirmed a 2013 release for PAL regions. Bravely Default is still very much an unknown quantity, yet it can be confirmed to have one of the most exquisite soundtracks of any Square or Enix gaming properties since the turn of the century. In similar localisation news Shin Megami Tensei IV has been confirmed for an American release on the 16th of July – just two months after the Japanese release. Finally, Wii U’s Pikmin 3 has been laughably penciled in for an August 4 release – missing the console’s artificially extended launch window by some months. Nintendo’s post launch support of the Wii U has been shockingly poor, with even this mid-tier Nintendo offering many months away. It never pays to prematurely count a Nintendo console out, but Wii U looks dead in the water at present.

Nintendo also lighted upon this occasion to unveil the the first screens for New Yoshi’s Island and their A Link to the Past sequel for the 3DS – and… the results are not all that great. Both games look significantly worse than their SNES counterparts, and, while New Yoshi’s Island still manages to look somewhat attractive in spite of this, the new Zelda game would not look out of place on iOS. On a more positive note, the Zelda footage revealed several game mechanics not present in the 1991 original; namely the ability to turn link into a drawing in order to travel to inaccessible areas through the walls, and an increased emphasis on traversing a dungeon’s verticality – thus making use of the 3DS’ mostly awful 3D capabilities. Finally, Earthbound is at long last set to make its debut on the Virtual Console [yay!] but Lusipurr will not be able to play it [boo!] on account of it being released solely on the lackluster Wii U. Did Nintendo not think that 3DS owners might like to play a bit of Earthbound?

“C’mon, do me a solid, matey!”

Journalistic Complicity Is the Real ‘Evil Within’

The father of Resident Evil, Shinji Mikami, has this week announced his first proper survival horror title since the universally acclaimed Resident Evil 4. In an era when survival horror has largely fallen to shit, the announcement of The Evil Within should be met with universal enthusiasm, and to a large degree it has been, and yet some have been decidedly soured by the experience – including The PA Report’s Ben Kuchera.

For a long time now video game developers have been getting far too friendly with game journalists – and this can cut both ways. Sometimes this can lead to developers becoming very publicly upset with reviewers when a game they have worked on gets trashed by someone with whom they have established a personal report. Other times this ‘special relationship’ leads to a publication compromising their journalistic independence in order to maintain their privileged insider access. This can happen in the form of ‘Gameinformer’ early reviews, which one has never known to dip bellow 8.9/10, or it can happen in the way that occurred this week with the unveiling of The Evil Within.

Zenimax, the parent company to Shinji Mikami’s Tango Gameworks, has worked out a sweetheart arrangement with gaming tabloid, IGN, whereby IGN supplies very soft and uncritical early impressions of The Evil Within in exchange for exclusive early access to the game. Meanwhile, every other gaming site is left to transcribe IGN’s empty platitudes into their own words, which is a grave disservice to both readers and journalism as a whole. While the game will be properly judged in the fullness of time, early impressions will be shaped almost exclusively through the prism of IGN, when they almost certainly should not be.

Even the choking grasp of the JRT has its limits.

Japanese Game Market Grows Despite Being Mauled by JRT

As James masterfully explained in his excellent editorial this week, the Japanese economy was once the envy of the world until years of decline led to a legacy prosperity tax, the JRT, essentially choking the Japanese economy of vital economic participation. No industry seems to have borne the brunt of the JRT more than gaming, as increasingly pessimistic consumers cut back on expensive discretionary purchases like gaming consoles; this has taken a bite out of handheld revenues and has essentially decimated the home console space. With this in mind, analysts have long wondered at what point the plunging fortunes of the Japanese gaming market would find a floor to this downward trend, and thus establish a new stable baseline for market performance. This week it would seem that the Japanese market has established this new floor, and thus 2012 marks the first time in five years that the Japanese market has not contracted.

In the fiscal year 2012 the Japanese gaming market grew by roughly 4.6 billion dollars – or 1.2 percent. That sort of growth might appear somewhat meager to our well-rounded Western eyes, yet it is a damn sight better than previous years of negative growth. This result appears to be largely hardware based, as hardware sales were up by five percent to 1.8 billion dollars, while software sales were down by 1.2 percent to 2.8 billion dollars. The real sting in the tail of these numbers comes by way of the fact that the Japanese social market grew by a much faster rate than the traditional game market in 2012, and is now valued at 4.3 billion dollars – just 300 million dollars less than the conventional games market. The reason for this is once again thought to be, unsurprisingly, the JRT, which kicks in at a higher rate for physical goods than it does for mobile downloads.

Tomb Raider: All the Bravest?

Square Enix Reveals the Scope of Eidos Failure

Dismal failures: Tomb Raider, Hitman: Absolution, and Sleeping Dogs have recently come to public attention on account of their plunging the otherwise profitable enterprise of Square Enix into the depths of unprofitability. Square Enix were poised to make a 3.5 billion yen profit for the year until the sudden Western failure of these key franchises, leading to losses of 13 billion yen [approximately $140,000,000]. The internal studio sales targets, which were regarded as crucial for the success of these titles, have been disclosed this week, and have served to lay bare the full and terrible scope of this Western Eidos failure.

The Square Enix conservative internal mid-range prediction was that Tomb Raider would sell between 5-6 million units, Hitman: Absolution would sell between 4.5-5 million units, and that Sleeping Dogs would sell between 2-2.5 million units. Thus, when these titles sold a mere 3.4, 3.6, and 1.75 million copies respectively, it posed a software-sales shortfall of 2.75 million units, which in turn cost the company’s bottom-line a cool 16.5 billion yen, forcing Square Enix to take on 13 billion yen in losses.

“Let’s talk about Sleeping Dogs: we were looking at selling roughly 2~2.5 million units in the EUR/NA market based on its game content, genre and Metacritic scores. In the same way, game quality and Metacritic scores led us to believe that Hitman had the potential to sell 4.5~5 million units and 5~6 million units for Tomb Raider in EUR/NA and Japanese markets combined.”

“Of course, we want to hedge risk in budgeting these units directly into the forecast, therefore we base the forecast on 80-90% of the total sales potential of each title. However, it is disappointing that our results fell bellow these marks.”

Truly startling results out of Square Enix! The Eidos management structure must have really run awry if just three of their console titles cost somewhere significantly north of 16.5 billion yen in order to produce and market. One can only hope that these disgraceful Western failures do not compromise the running of Square Enix’s hyper efficient Japanese arm.

In the year 2XXX a corrupt corporation is punished for the digital horrors they created.

Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon Leaked Online Two Weeks Before Release

Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon is the hottest name in first-person shooters at the moment. The game’s existence was only confirmed on April 1st, and already it is just a stone’s throw away from its April 30 launch. Developed by Ubisoft Montreal, Blood Dragon is set in a world best described as a 1980s VHS imagining of the future [circa 2007]. Michael Biehn [of Terminator and Aliens fame] has been cast as Sergent Rex Power Colt, the part cyborg protagonist tasked with infiltrating a futuristic island and bringing down the hostile cyborg army, Omega Force.

The creativity behind this title has lead to much in the way of positive buzz, and even the gaming press has not been [officially] allowed to play past the initial ten minutes of gameplay – and yet many PC gamers have played the campaign through to completion gratis. Russian hackers have developed a piece of software which exploits a weakness in Uplay, Ubisoft’s obnoxious DRM platform, in order to trick it into thinking that the user’s account owns the content of their choosing, and thus furnishing them with a direct download link for the selected software. As such, Blood Dragon has been released two weeks early on PC, and can be found on multiple torrent sites. While the game in question looks great, one must admit to a certain satisfaction that Ubisoft’s own DRM has led to their operations being compromised in such a way. Piracy is currently the only way for PC gamers to enjoy Blood Dragon without being subjected to unacceptable Uplay DRM.

Who could have foreseen this stunning Revelaiton?

Resident Evil: Revelations HD Release To Feature ‘Season Pass’ and DLC

When Resident Evil: Revelations HD was announced for the PS3, Xbox 360, and PC, its fifty dollar price-tag felt a little steep given that the same title had been available on the 3DS for over a year at a launch-price of forty dollars. The price-hike was a little hard to stomach, but then the title was receiving completely revamped textures, lighting, and of course a large bump in resolution – so this seemed to balance things somewhat.

This week a pre-order campaign on Steam has revealed that Resident Evil: Revelations HD is set to feature a ‘season pass’. The Steam campaign was offering tiers of rewards for pre-orderers based on how many people pre-order the game. One of the reward tiers is for a ‘season pass’ granting access to four pieces of DLC which appear to pertain to the game’s ‘Raid Mode’; a mode which remixes the main campaign’s content into challenging score-attack stages. The game’s pricing was already a difficult pill to swallow given that this is just a re-heat of old content, but outfitting the game with ‘season passes’ and paid DLC is just a bridge too far. When Resident Evil 4 was released for the PS2 it contained the additional ‘Separate Ways’ campaign for no extra cost. If the Resident Evil: Revelations HD team wish to develop more content for ‘Raid Mode’, then said content should be free of charge in order to compensate for the game’s late and overly expensive arrival on HD platforms.

[PSA]: Did you know that by simply linking your friends to Lusipurr.com and having them reference you in the comments section of any post you could win a $60 game of your choosing? Well it is true – no foolin’. Get your buddies to do you a solid, and by collecting the most friend references you will qualify for our bonanza prize and have your deeds recorded in gaming immortality!*

*Should you select software which supports such cheat-code functionality.

This is the face of one community’s anguish.

Horrific New England Shooting: Football, Autism, Skateboarding to Blame

Tragedy has struck the township of Newtown, Connecticut this week, when twenty year old Adam Lanza shot dead his mother, before taking several of her guns to the local school [Sandy Hook Elementary School], where he savagely murdered a class of children. In all, twenty-eight people have senselessly perished; twenty children [ranging between six and seven years of age], six non-related adults, Lanza’s mother, Nancy, and Lanza himself, in his final craven bid to escape the repercussions of his actions.

Adam Lanza, a reticent and solitary young man, was a known sufferer of Autism, a mild form of high-functioning retardation, also known as Dr. Hans Asperger’s Down Syndrome. He was said to be heavily influenced by the violent culture of European football, and deeply immersed in urban skateboarding “thuglyfe”, a pursuit which was said to have been a keen interest of his. Lanza was also said to have enjoyed playing video games, a hobby which is not believed to have played a part in his recent hijinks.

When asked about the reason for the recent spike in American school-shootings, Fox News expert, Dr. Keith Ablow, stated: “I fear that our level of empathy just as a culture, as a society, is being diminished by things like European football and professional skateboarding that seem to take people to a kind of fictional realm. I guess you could add thuglyfe to that, gangster-banger thuglyfe. Now people feel less for one another, they can think of them almost as opposing players, or rival skaters, and for the people among us who are vulnerable to acts of violence who are violently ill, if you will, that means they consider others even less than ever before.”

While one is loathe to say “I told you so”, it is nevertheless the case that the ill-advised legitimisation of violent football hooliganism was always going to have wide-ranging and tragic consequences for our communities. From Newtown, Connecticut to London circa 2011, the malignant hand of football hooliganism is far-reaching indeed. Meanwhile, the troubling sub-culture that has grown up around skateboarding has fared little better. The “in-your-face” attitude of skateboarding is inherently anti-community and anti-family by design, which almost certainly played a role in Lanza’s craven decision to brutally murder his own mother. Furthermore, in recent years the world of skateboarding has been infiltrated by the violent ethnic philosophy of “thuglyfe”, which has recently seen gangster-banger wrappers like “Little Wayne” announce their retirement from “music” in order to fully devote themselves to corrupting skateboard culture.

It is all very well to claim that such malign and insidious forms of entertainment should be protected on the basis that adults possess the faculties to discern the fantasy of the football field from the reality of hum-drum everyday life, yet such blithe rationality does not account for adults of diminished personal agency. The sufferers of Asperger’s Down Syndrome evidently do not possess the faculties to function as adults in this regard, which makes the arbitrary nature of adult consent somewhat problematic. Such people can best be [figuratively] likened to an empty cup, easily filled by such over-stimulating sensory experiences as the flagrant destruction of football rioting and the “in-your-face” attitude and swarthy demeanor of ethnic “thuglyfe” skatesters; they are thus led to act out violently, much like their dubious idols of subcultural decline. At any rate, in the absence of any tenable solutions, it is the view of this publication that the football and skateboarding entertainment mediums should be curbed wherever possible until a more equitable response can be found to the problems they pose.

The industry would [arguably] be in a better place if id would have just patented and trolled the mechanics of first-person shooters.

Sega Resort to Patent Trolling For Profit

A cash-strapped and irrelevant Sega has this week launched legal proceedings against Level-5, seeking damages of £6.8 million [no USD conversion available] for breaches of copyright pertaining to their long-running Football Manager franchise, along with the cessation of sale for all eight of Level-5′s Inazuma Eleven games. It is the contention of Sega that Level-5 have infringed upon their patented touch controls by allowing gamers to directly control players with a DS stylus in their football-themed JRPG series, Inazuma Eleven.

Sega’s opportunistic money-grab might be understandable if it made any kind of sense, yet it quite simply does not. If Sega fancies themselves to hold the patent to touch-based character movement, then surely they would be suing Square Enix for The World Ends With You, along with countless other DS properties. Moreover, the original Inazuma Eleven game had a Japanese release of August 2008, while the first installment of Football Manager to make use of touch input was the iOS port of Football Manager 2010, which was not released until October of 2009.

Essentially, it should be Level-5 suing the opportunistic Sega for copying their football based touch-controls, yet to do so would be obviously silly. Any just outcome to this nonsense would see Sega paying damages to Level-5 for their frivolous and disingenuous legal action, yet sadly the case will probably just result in an out of court settlement, which is what Sega is [literally] banking on. Level-5 for their part, in response to Sega’s outrageous allegations, have pointed out the deleterious and chilling effect that game-mechanic patents have on the industry, as the subsequent patent trolling only serves to stifle innovation in gaming: “While Inazuma Eleven does not violate Sega’s patent, we do recognize that Sega’s lawsuit could restrict choices in gaming from here on out as well as hindering the growth of the game industry.”

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more; or power Wii U with our GameCube dead.

The Wiikly Wii U Dishonour Roll

Lusipurr.com is sure that readers have grown tired by now of reading about the defects of Nintendo’s Wii U, just as Lusipurr.com staff have become tired of writing about them. Sadly however, Nintendo insists on monopolising the news headlines with ever-greater helpings of dire tidings. Thus, it is once again Lusipurr.com’s thankless task to recount Nintendo’s latest epic failures of the Wiik.

This week the hackers responsible for the creation and maintenance of the Wii homebrew channel have succeeded in getting their homebrew channel up and running on the Wii U. Currently the channel is only functional while in the Wii U’s Wii compatibility mode, yet the hackers responsible view this development as a very useful foot-in-the-door, which will potentially act as a staging ground for further incursions into Nintendo’s “new” hardware. Nintendo views the installation of the homebrew channel as unauthorised software, and maintains that its use will void customer warranties.

In other news, it has been shockingly revealed that Nintendo’s Wii U has fallen just a tad short of Iwata’s predicted attach rate of five games per system. It turns out that the Wii U has an attach rate of just 1.2 games per system, so if one assumes [as seems to be the case] that the majority of systems were purchased as Nintendo Land bundles, then that would mean that [approximately] just one in five customers have seen their way fit to purchase additional software. But then, who knows? There is still a couple of months until the deadline of Iwata’s scrying, so perhaps Oprah will buy a copy of New Super Mario Bros. U for every child in Africa, or something.

Finally, for weeks now Eurogamer’s Digital Foundry team has been analysing Wii U multiplatform games and comparing them unfavourably to their original releases on the PS3 and Xbox 360, yet this week the Wii U finally tasted success in one of Digital Foundry’s console face-offs. Digital Foundry writer, Richard Leadbetter, could no doubt scarcely stifle his laughter when penning the headline: “Wii U blitzes PS3 and 360 as the “greenest” console”. The Wii U when under full-load draws just thirty-two Watts of power, which makes it leagues more environmentally-friendly than even the newest model of PS3 Slim, which draws up to seventy Watts of power. This diminutive environmental footprint is something of an engineering marvel in the world of modern console manufacture, yet the fact that the Wii U is scarcely capable of matching seven year old consoles in terms of performance, makes this something of a dubious distinction.